List: 'Australia’s Top 10 Brands'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. Last Saturday in AFL football, (my team) Collingwood thrashed its arch-rival Carlton. Post-match Carlton’s coach said ‘To see players pull out, not go in and miss tackles, it’s damning on our brand’ [1]. When I read that I thought ‘Eh? A football club’s a brand?’ But why not? Of course it is. Bastion Brands is a Melbourne consultancy specialising in creating brands [2]. Its ‘About’ webpage’s loaded with jargon [3]. But one jargon-free sentence is ‘We believe that when a business has the courage to stand for something in the marketplace, it becomes a brand’. Bastion calls its branding methodology BE – because, as it says, ‘We believe the best corporate brands, such as Apple, Google, Virgin and Bunnings are those whose customers feel they can BE a part of’. Using that methodology, Bastion’s compiled a list of ‘Australia’s Top 10 Brands’. Refreshingly, it explains, at least in broad terms, the multi-stage process used to arrive at this list. It says being on the list’s ‘not a measurement of financial success or morality, but rather pure brand power’. And ‘not all of these brands want to sell stuff – but they sure as hell could’. [4] You can see that number 5 is the Collingwood Football Club – about which Bastion says ‘The army of people who belong to arguably Australia’s greatest club continue to grow in belief and passion’. That’s only because Collingwood continues to thrash lesser clubs. Like Carlton.